:Gisbert Longolius: Ein niederrheinischer Humanist

Abstract

Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. xiii + 252, hb. £45.00, ISBN-13: 978-0-19-921236-1.The Other Virgil is a wide-ranging and ambitious book. Craig Kallendorf announces at the outset his belief that although the Aeneid is superficially a poem 'celebrating the achievements of Augustus and his age' (p. v), there runs alongside (or against) this celebration an account of 'what was sacrificed in pursuit of Rome and the civiization it engendered' (p. vi). He thus aligns himself with a 'pessimistic' school of Virgilian scholarship, typified by the work of Adam Parry, Oliver Lyne, and Richard Thomas. It is Thomas's work in particular which provides the backdrop to Kallendorf's book. In Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge, 2001), Thomas forcefully argued two points: first, that these anti-Augustan would have been available to ancient readers; and, second, that subsequent generations of scholars and translators (John Dryden is the worst offender) have colluded in disguising this Virgil from the common reader. Kallendorf accepts these central points, but here aims to chart a continuous tradition of creative responses to a 'pessimistic' or anti-Augustan Virgil, showing 'how reading Virgil the grain, so to speak, helped unleash artistic creativity in some totally unexpected ways' (p. ix). The literary works he covers are diverse, ranging from Francesco Sforza's historical epic Sphortias to Victor Le Plat's Virgile en France. Three seventeenth-century texts are discussed: The Tempest, Paradise Lost, and the lyric poems of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.The book is an intelligent and passionately argued one, but Kallendorf is a dogmatic reader, and the texts under discussion are sometimes stifled by the sheer strength of his conviction. His reading of The Tempest is a case in point. He wants the play to be a protest against colonization which turns 'the model text of the colonizers against them, focusing on the other voices in the Aeneid' (p. 15). Accordingly, he looks at Gonzalo's speech concerning his proposed plantation and governance of the island, and points out that the passage is often read in the light of colonial activity in the new world. Gonzalo ends by saying that he would 'with such perfection govern ..../ T'excel the Golden Age' (2.1.163-4), and 'we should not forget', Kallendorf tells us, 'that the locus classicus for the Golden Age was Virgil's fourth Eclogue'. A large chunk of the fourth Eclogue is quoted, which has no obvious verbal similarities to the speech (there is no reason to assume Gonzalo is referring to a Virgilian rather than, say, an Ovidian Golden Age - if, that is, he has a literary text in mind at all). Kallendorf's conclusion is bold: 'In this speech, Shakespeare is therefore positing a Virgilian vision of how colonial power might be projected on this island' (p. 116). A huge leap of faith is required to follow this line of reasoning (which, in any case, leads us to the Eclogues rather than the Aeneid), and the sleight of hand illustrates a problem with the book as a whole: Kallendorf tends to assume what he has set out to prove. It comes as a surprise to be ingenuously assured that The Tempest is 'by no means a slavish imitation of the Aeneid' (p. 117). Who could possibly think that it was? Many critics have found Virgilian echoes in the play, but the only evidence we have that it is a 'rewriting' (pp. …